One of the first stops on the All Over tour was New York, and one of the first projects there was a sit-down with Ed Champion, he of the infamous Bat Segundo Show. Great questions over great sandwiches: a hard combination to beat. And the results are now up for your listening pleasure right here.

And the family trip we took to Xian, which I've mined once or twice before, comes through for me once again: a hard moment going bright, now up as part of Issue Two of the fine new Hot Metal Bridge, along with great fiction by Dan Chaon and Dan Marshall, nonfiction by Michelle Wildgen and Shya Scanlon, and interviews with Tom Perrotta and Stewart O’Nan.

Steven Millhauser has been one of my favorite authors for years, and when Ron Hogan called I'd just finished The Knife Thrower and Other Stories in the course of a trip to Nanjing, so pretending that it would be in any sense possible to pick an all-time favorite story was easier than it otherwise might have been. Up, now, at Beatrice.

Tonight begins the tour that the folks at Dzanc have put together for me to help get word out about the new collection. Lift-off is at Shaman Books in Ann Arbor, and from there we'll hit New York, Chicago, Memphis, Asheville, Greenwood, New Orleans, Iowa City, Urbana-Champaign, Davis, and my hometown of Ukiah, California, finishing up with an event or two back in Beijing. To those of you who can make it to one of the events, I look forward to meeting you; to those of you who can't, feel free to follow along over at Ullage, where I'll be posting dispatches from the road every chance I get.